Russian space officials and members of the European Commission will meet in early July to discuss joining forces against thousands of potentially hazardous asteroids, the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said. Despite the growing concern about the asteroid threat, no anti-asteroid defense programs have been developed in practice so far, with only several theoretical concepts being studied. At a meeting in Moscow on July 7, the European Commission will consider Roscosmos's proposal to start a joint anti-asteroid project with the European Union.

Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. Dubbed extreme scale computing, such machines are needed DARPA says to "meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability and security."

The hot tech news on Friday is the exploding scandal that’s been dubbed the “iPhone Death Grip.” Like everything else related to the iPhone, it’s turned into an overhyped emotional stew. iPhone users have found that touching the metal band can disrupt connections. Some people are reporting, and even posting videos showing, that when you wrap your hand around the iPhone 4, the cellular Internet strength visibly drops. You can actually see the bars disappearing. A cellphone that loses its signal when you pick it up? Well, that could be considered a drawback. The New York Times David Pogue says "I was mystified at first. I’ve never seen it on the iPhone unit I’ve been reviewing. I can’t even reproduce it, no matter how hard I try. I’m sitting here right now. I’m wrapping my hand every which way — I’m even holding it with two fists, completely concealing the silver band around the edges — and my four-bar signal strength doesn’t waver."